Visual Artistry of Ultra Music Festival 2017

Visual artists from around the world come to perform at the legendary Ultra Music Festival in Miami. The festival truly provides a highly stylized blank canvas that allows visual art production teams paired with DJ’s to deliver their creative visions. For commercial festival properties this is a unique attribute of Ultra, compared to Electric Daisy or Tomorrowland where visuals play a secondary role to the set designs and theatrical performances.

This year more VJ’s than ever before in the history of the festival brought amazing artwork to the audience. The rise of the VJ and expansion of the EDM production environment unfortunately has not yielded equal recognition for the importance of the VJ as an artist in the music business. We thought it would be cool to start featuring these artists during our tenure at the front of house control platform as the VJ remains a figure hidden in the shadows, unknown and un advertised from the general public. There is a rich pool of sale able content and artistry available to the music industry through the VJ, seeking a pathway into the visible light of its marketing and sales networks.

How to do this, and what the means of capitalization are, or even the desire to credit visual artists seems to need more development for the artform and industry as a whole.

As a tribute to the VJ’s and attempt to help inform a bit featured here in photographic form are some of the awesome VJ’s who make Ultra Music Festival an amazing visual feast.

V Squared Labs also provided a customized version of its Epic mk4 VJ software which featured an even richer chaser and perform-able effect system modified by Matt Guertin.

The entire stage was modeled and mapped in 3D with a complete spatial preview. Utilizing the chaser and edge tracing effects systems allows dual HD video capture of any guest VJ or camera source to be manipulated and remixed in real time in 3d space. Over 40 different chaser system pattern types are now utilized in EPIC unlike the software’s which our system inspired, allowing only one look.

Utilizing the EPIC system Vello also was able to collaborate with Simon Evans on Dash Berlin and Kygo shows, and Tchami using capture and EPIC’s chaser/edge effects.

This style of VJ remixing with interactive effects performance enables artists to come in and really utilize the complex LED design architecturally in a musically responsive way.

Vello Virkhaus has been the resident Main Stage VJ for Ultra Music Festival worldwide since the early 2000’s and has inspired, mentored and collaborated with many in the growing VJ community.

V Squared Labs

December 16, 2013

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Supporters, and Clients,

In some way, shape, or form, you all are responsible for our continued prosperity here at V Squared Labs. We sincerely thank you and wish you a lovely Holiday Season!May this find you & yours, happy and well. Here at V Squared we are embarking on many new projects in 2014 and cannot wait to share them with you.